This table was indeed one of her favourite pages—it gave her, she felt,
a bird’s-eye view of all history—and with her head for figures she
never forgot that the Ten Commandments and the Ten Plagues were given in
1494 B.C., and that the sun stood still at Joshua’s word in 1454, while
Daniel was in the Den of Lions in 536. She was puzzled, though, at the
destruction of Troy which intervened between Joshua’s interference with
the sun and Saul’s anointment. Of the twenty-two great events that
preceded the Christian era, this was the only one that the Bible forbore
to mention. Subsequently to Christianity things seemed to her to have
moved fast, for up till the year 1600 alone, fourteen “remarkable
Things” occurred—two-thirds as many as had happened in the whole
previous 4007 years since the world was created—while after 1600,
extraordinary events sprouted like blackberries, no less than fifty
crowding to their grand climacteric in Trafalgar.
In these fifty she was glad to see included the Confutation of Popery by
Martin Luther—a personage with whom Miss Gentry had made her
familiar—and she thrilled almost with local pride to find “Arts and
Sciences first taught at Cambridge, 1119,” for the Cambridge carriers
sometimes penetrated eastwards as far as Chipstone itself. As a carrier,
indeed, she was immensely excited by the “Eleven Days successive Snow”
of 1674, the “Frost for thirteen Weeks” of 1684, “The Terrible high Wind
of November 26, 1703,” “the great and total Eclipse of the Sun, April
22, 1713,” and the “severe Frost for nine Weeks” beginning on Christmas
Eve, 1739. She could vividly sympathize with the unfortunate carriers of
those days, and she did not wonder that these brumal phenomena should
form so great a proportion of the few score happenings of Universal
History, for frosts and winds must be terrible indeed to be recounted as
on a level with the shooting of Admiral Byng, the American Declaration
of Independence, the Birth of the Prince of Wales, and the “Attempted
Assassination of George III at Drury Lane by Hadfield, a lunatic.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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